Minecraft creator and Mojang co-founder Markus 'Notch' Persson said in a recent article on Develop that he worries about Mojang growing too big. If that were to happen he thinks that the company could lose the independent spirit it is known for. Persson also said that he did not want Mojang to work on what he called "super polished games," as those tend to require larger teams and bigger budgets.

Persson also revealed that the company has no middle management structure, which ultimately allows the staff to work on their chosen projects.

"I hope we can keep the spirit for as long as possible,” said Persson. "The atmosphere is usually very relaxed in the office, and we don't have any middle management or anything like that. I worry about growing, as that could change the mood to something else, so I want us to keep focusing on not making super polished games, as those require larger teams."

Mojang CEO Carl Manneh added that he had similar concerns about the studio's future and retaining that indie spirit that has made Mojang a household name.

"I hope we are still making great innovative games and having a lot of fun," he said. "We will probably be more people, depending on which projects we choose, but we do everything in our power to keep the ‘indie spirit' at the studio. Whatever that is."

The comments were part of a feature on Develop called "Mojang Uncovered," about the inner workings of the studio and included comments from Markus Persson, Daniel Kaplan, Carl Manneh, Jakob Porser and Markus Toivonen. You can read the entire thing here.

one of the reasons why I probably wont buy 0x10c. Lack of consistent meaningful updates on the minecraft front over the last year, and a lack of progress on Cobalt. The only thing I've seen out of them is re-releases of minecraft, which end up being popular due to word-of-mouth and low-price. not to mention that they haven't even been doing the work on them..

In addition Scrolls seems wholly un-interersting. If I wanted a TCG game I'd go play locally with REAL cards.

I think they are too worried about the indie stuff to the point that it is inhibiting their success, and honestly, i think it will start to damage their reputation. In the end, I don't care if you're labeled as 'indie' or not. Just make a good game and support it well.

As for 'not even doing the work', I still see a fair amount of process given how hard it can be to restructure an existing project so you can properly expand it. It's not as if they have dozens of people working on it.

It's being developped by some of the same people who work at mojang, perhaps it's a side project (and is at least for jeb). But I think my main point was missed here at the end. When it comes to releasing games the 'indie spirit' isn't that you're a small company. It's that you take time to talk to the community and do things that they want. Marcus and the current Mojang team do this very very little, and in fact function more like a lifeless large corporation when it comes to user support than anything I've ever seen from what he's trying to refer to as 'indie'

No they don't have dozens of people working on it. They have a very small handful, which is completely ridiculous.

Marcus's paranoia about "not being indie" is crippling his companies development. Minecraft development has completely stagnated due to lack of support for the community. the XBLA and Pocket editions are laughably behind in development, and Marcus refuses to hire additional staff because he wants to still "be indie".

Bullshit, he wont hire new staff because he's a crap business manager.

They are behind because, at least for the Xbox360 version, Mojang isn't developing those products. Other teams are trying to incorporate the source code on Minecraft to work on those completely different systems.